Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Oscar Nominations

I did pretty well in my predictions this year.

I don't know why I only picked 9 nominees for Best Picture, but the Academy did to so that worked out. I got 8 of 9 right. They picked Amour over Moonrise Kingdom. I've seen all of the 8 and Moonrise but not Amour yet.

Director seems to be the big shocker of a category. I got only two picks right, Lincoln and Life of PI which seemed pretty easy. I got three wrong, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo and Django and people seemed quite surprised that Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow didn't get nominated. I'm thrilled that Benh Zeitlin did for Beasts of the Southern Wild. I'm not so sure about David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook or Michael Haneke for Amour. Again, I haven't seen Amour yet (and it's not playing anywhere around me) but I'm still kinda pissed about Cache.

I got three right in Actor. I'm pissed that John Hawkes didn't get picked for The Sessions and think he deserved it over Joaquin Phoenix. I have heard good things about Jean-Louis Trintignant in Amour and wasn't as thrilled with Jackman as everyone else seems to be.

I nailed all five picks for Best Actress.

In each of the Supporting categories I went 4/5. I think Leonardo was better than DeNiro and Maggie Smith was better than Jacki Weaver (well, more entertaining at least).

I went 4/5 in each of the writing categories. I really liked Looper and haven't seen Flight yet. I also liked Perks of Being a Wallflower and while Argo was very good, I thought for a 2 hour movie there was very little character development.

Here's the list of feature films (not shorts) by nominations. Aside from Amour, Anna Karenina and Flight, I've seen all the films with more than one nomination. Of the 23 films with just one nomination I've only seen six. I've seen none of the Foreign Language, Animated or Documentary features. I've seen one of the Documentary Shorts, Monday's at Racine at IFF Boston and it was wonderful. And I just watched the nominated Simpsons short on YouTube (a bad illegal copy).

I am surprised at how many categories I've already completed. I've seen all the nominees in 7 categories (both supporting, adapted screenplay, editing, makeup, and both sound categories). In another 8 categories I only need to see one film to complete them, and once I see just two films (Amour and Anna Karenina) I'll have completed five of these 8 categories.